Question

I have a string that I need to edit, it looks something similar to this:

string = "Idaho Ave N,,Crystal,Mn,55427-1463,US,,610839124763,Expedited"

If you notice the state initial “Mn” is not in proper formatting. I’m trying to use a regular expression to change this:

re.sub("[A-Z][a-z],", "[A-Z][A-Z],", string)

However, re.sub treats the second part as a literal and will change Mn, to [A-Z][A-Z],. How would I use re.sub (or something similar and simple) to properly change Mn, to MN, in this string?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You can pass a function as the replacement parameter to re.sub to generate the replacement string from the match object, e.g.:

import re

s = "Idaho Ave N,,Crystal,Mn,55427-1463,US,,610839124763,Expedited"

def upcase(match):
    return match.group().upper()

print re.sub("[A-Z][a-z],", upcase, s)

(This is ignoring the concern of whether you’re genuinely finding state initials with this method.)

The appropriate documentation for re.sub is here.